


my ghost, where'd you go? i can't find you in the body sleeping next to me

by arrowsanonymous



Category: The Trials of Apollo - Rick Riordan
Genre: Angst, Car Accidents, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, M/M, Racist Language, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:00:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25880971
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arrowsanonymous/pseuds/arrowsanonymous
Summary: human au of apollo + hyacinthus, but make it angsty.
Relationships: Apollo/Hyacinthus (Percy Jackson)
Comments: 26
Kudos: 53





	my ghost, where'd you go? i can't find you in the body sleeping next to me

######  _i._

Apollo is eight, and he is lying in bed beside his bestest friend in the whole world.

The see-through curtain blows inside because of the soft midnight breeze, illuminated by the white street-lights outside. His mattress, laid on the floor and covered with his favorite yellow bedsheets, gives a clear view to the rest of his room.

He looks at the dancing curtain, feeling Hyacinthus’s hair tickle his left arm, listening to his soft breathing. The room is quiet, with only occasional car sounds and hoots of nightbirds flying by their neighborhood. Apollo knows that it’s way past his bedtime, way past the grown-ups’ bedtimes, too, but he can’t bring himself to sleep. He doesn’t want to leave the waking world and forget Hya’s warmth.

Slowly, as gently as he can, Apollo turns to his side and pushes himself up with his elbows. Even in the dim light, Hya looks peaceful and serene, his face like one of those kids in bright magazines and movies, the ones Apollo always liked reading. The bare light that manages to hit the mattress lightens up his hair, turning it from its darkened brown to a golden thread, shimmering like magic.

 _It_ is _magic,_ Apollo thinks and believes with all of his childish heart, fascinated by the fluttering of Hyacinthus’s flaxen eyelashes. _It’s real._

And he truly did believe that; his friend, his bestest friend in the whole world, magical? Of course he is.

Minutes that feel like hours that feel like seconds pass by, and when Apollo’s arm starts turning numb, he goes back to laying down next to Hya, staring at the ceiling this time. The mattress is soft, sticking to his body shape well, fun to roll around on and feels nice. Just like Hya’s bed at his room.

Finally, eventually, Apollo closes his eyes and drifts away, but his best friend’s warmth didn’t leave; it stays like a protective guard around him, enveloping him with the very essence of Hyacinthus.

  
  


######  _ii._

Apollo is twelve, and he can feel the top of Hyacinthus’s curly hair pressed against his shoulder. 

The day had been rough for Hya, and his only solace is Apollo’s room. They’ve upgraded from a mattress on the floor to a mattress on a steel bed frame, covered with yellow paint marker doodles and stickers. The window is closed, the curtains changed to thick drapes that cover the glass more effectively, and the air conditioner swirls around cold air in the room.

“I’m tired,” Hya mumbles, his speech muffled by the sheer amount of blankets over the two of them. “‘Wanna sleep.”

“Then sleep,” replies Apollo softly, staring up on the ceiling littered with glow-in-the-dark star stickers. He can hear Hyacinthus’s steady breathing, mingling with the hum of the AC and the otherwise silent room, more calming than anything else. He turns to face Hya, lifting the blankets.

His eyelids are drooping, long dark eyelashes almost blending in with his dark skin if it wasn’t littered with freckles, red lips slightly parted like it always is, dark blue eyes flickering in and out of sight. “Can’t,” Hya replies, his voice a bare whisper. Apollo spends way too much time staring at Hya before he realizes what he turned for.

Apollo blinks, _hard_ , to bring his focus back on the present. “What’s wrong?” he asks when noticing tear tracks down his dark skin. “Why can’t you sleep? Are you alright?”

“Was just thinking,” Hyacinthus says as a reply, pushing back and reaching up to wipe his face with his sleeve. Instantly, Apollo misses the warmth.

Silence dawns on the two of them for a few seconds, Apollo meeting Hya’s strange blue eyes, then the newly sprouted tension is broken abruptly by a question. “You won’t ever hate me, right?”

“Of course not,” replies Apollo, earnestly and honestly, with the entirety of his twelve-year old heart. “Hya, you’re a good person. I won’t hate you, ever. Cross my heart and hope to die. I swear to everything that I can swear on that I won’t.”

A soft sniffle, followed by a muffled laugh. “Even your ukulele?” Hya asks, his voice less dispirited now. He looks more awake, dark blue eyes shimmering in the darkness of the bedroom.

Frowning, Apollo considers this. “Yes,” he says seriously, “I swear on my ukulele.”

The giggles that overcomes the two of them in the middle of the night is better than laughter in the middle of the day, and with Hya underneath the blanket with Apollo in an attempt to muffle their laughter, there’s really nothing else he can ask for.

  
  


######  _iii._

Apollo is fifteen, and Hyacinthus is cursing at him as he bandages his bloodied knuckles.

"Why’d you do that?" Hya asks, scowling. "My pride can take the hit. Honestly, it's really foolish of you, taking their bait."

"They fucking called you slurs, Hyacinthus," Apollo shot back, ignoring his split lip. "It's not about pride." 

Hyacinthus looked at him with something like grudging admiration and fond exaperation. "You idiot, you still didn't have to launch yourself at them like that," he retorts, wiping off the blood from Apollo's face tenderly despite his words.

“I wanted—want—to,” replies Apollo, picking up a bottle of 70% isopropyl alcohol with his free hand, considering it, then placing it back down on the floor. Instead, he picks up the pack of baby wipes and starts cleaning the wound on his knee. “That asshole needs to be taught a lesson. You don’t go around calling people the n-word like it’s a joke.”

Sighing, Hya ties up the bandage around Apollo’s bloody knuckles and moves to his face. “It was three to one,” Hya says, dabbing his split lip gently and then adding a light layer of salve around Apollo’s black eye. The room is bright, making Hya’s eyes shimmer like it’s been shattered into a million little pieces and then glued back together into a masterpiece. “I don’t know how you didn’t get anything broken… you only got a bruised rib.”

“Well, I’m a good fighter,” Apollo replies, his voice quieter than usual.

Hyacinthus doesn’t seem to realize how close they are, but Apollo does. _His breath smells like mint,_ Apollo thinks, trying his best not to just lean forward. If he does that, they’ll be kissing. The silence seems overbearing and heavy now.

In the middle of applying more of the herbal concoction to Apollo’s left eye, Hya pauses. Slowly, he lifts his finger away from Apollo’s eyelid and wipes off the salve on his pants. “You have constellations in your freckles,” Hya murmurs, not moving away. 

_Only an inch away._ So close, yet so far, with Apollo sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor and Hyacinthus leaning forward from his own sitting place on the floor, and the complete and utter lack of sound is deafening.

“Scorpio…” Hya whispers, lifting his finger again to trace Apollo’s cheek, “Eridanus…”

“Lyra?” Apollo adds quietly, barely making any sound, Hya nods slightly and moves to the other cheek to trace it, though at this point, Apollo’s focus isn’t on Hya’s warm touch, but on the way his red lips always part when he’s relaxed, the movements of his thick lashes, the million shards of diamonds in his eyes.

Then, without thinking, Apollo asks: “May I?”

Hyacinthus pauses from observing his freckles. It feels like it’s been an eternity, eons and eons of time lost just staring at each other—and then Hya nods again.

And then, like a spell broken and like a glass wall destroyed, Apollo feels Hya’s lips on his, and it tastes like mint and blood, mint and blood, _mint and blood_ , and Apollo knows—he’s never going to feel something like this again, entirely too awkward and perfect, entirely too painful and amazing, like the sound of thunder and the storm that follows.

  
  
  


######  _iii._

Apollo is eighteen, and his room is empty.

“College, huh?” Hya asks, carrying a box with ease and a smile, his pearly teeth stark white against his dark skin. “We did it, Apollo. We got this far.”

Smiling, Apollo looks up from taping together his last box of items and places down the roll of duct tape. “All that, and we’re gonna be roomies!” he adds, feeling far more giddy than he should be, after spending eighteen years sleeping in the same bed as Hya. “We have different majors, though… won’t be able to meet up much, would we?”

“That’s because you chose that medical doctor major,” Hyacinthus says, picking up a bunch of mugs and placing them on top of his box. “I chose viscom, it’s less time-consuming, at least.”

Apollo shrugs and goes back to taping his box, though the smile doesn’t dim. “Yeah, but I want to help people, you know?”

He can _hear_ Hya rolling his eyes. “You’ve got a savior complex,” Hya remarks, “always gotta fight for what’s right, huh?”

“You know me so well,” Apollo replies, finishing up with the box. He places the roll of duct tape on top of his suitcase, then stacks his box next to the door. The room he’s spent so much time in looks barren; the hardwood floor cleared of any dirty laundry, paper crumples, pencils, snack wrappings. The metal bed-frame still stands in the corner near the window, its yellow paint faded and stickers peeling, and the wall has been stripped of any posters. “Wow, this looks fucking weird.”

Hya joins him at the doorway, scanning the room. “I remember when we used to draw all over that bed and the walls,” he muses, “the drawings on the walls are gone. A pity—wish we could do that to our dorms.”

“We can buy an apartment near college eventually,” Apollo offers. “We’d still be room-mates, right? Just sharing rent.”

Frowning, Hya taps a single knuckle on the wall rhythmically. “That doesn’t sound too terrible.”

Apollo rolls his eyes and runs a hand through his hair. “Of course it doesn’t sound too terrible, Hya, it’s _my_ idea.”

“Alright, alright,” Hya laughs, playfully nudging Apollo’s shoulder, who returns it back, careful not to tip over any of the boxes they’ve neatly piled up. “We’re all packed up… one last midnight in Empire Street, Apollo?”

“You bet.”

  
  


######  _iv._

Apollo is twenty-one, and he doesn’t feel like getting drunk.

Instead, he opts to stay in the dorm room, observing the gradually darkening sky, this time without Hyacinthus’s body warmth. It feels like they’ve drifted apart, like that kiss happened centuries and not just years ago, and it feels so out of character for him to stay in and mull over bone names in Latin yet again and for Hya to be out, partying, _(with a boyfriend that isn’t him),_ but college does drive everyone mad.

He finds himself missing Hyacinthus over and over again, and over and over again Apollo reminds himself that they’re just friends, friends, friends, _friends—_

 _But friends don’t kiss,_ his brain says every time, _and you don’t get jealous when friends go out on dates._

“Fuck off,” he says out loud in a futile attempt to get his mind back on track. “ _Ossis femoris, metacarpal, costae vera... r-redde meus amor…_ ”

And that’s when Apollo breaks. In the dark, at 12 AM, lying on the bottom bunk bed while trying to memorize bones and accidentally saying what he’s been truly hiding for years in Latin. _Love me back._ He feels pathetic, weak, helpless, facing upwards and staring at a picture of Hyacinthus and him from years ago pinned to the bottom of the upper bed, blurry with unshed tears. _I hate him._ First time he's ever thought of that.

Every time Hyacinthus walks out of their dormitory, Apollo has always lied to himself by saying _It’s alright, he has a right to relationships._ But it’s a lie, and lies eventually always come back to bite him in the ass, and of course karma chooses to do that the night before his exam.

“ _C-costae fluktuantes,_ ” he continues, but Apollo’s words die in his mouth, tears running down the side of his face and pooling on the bed, when his phone rings.

He reaches to the floor and picks it up haphazardly. “Hello,” Apollo says, not even bothering to hide his nasally voice. “What’s up?”

 _“It’s about Hyacinthus,”_ the voice on the other side replies, a note of concern in his cadence. 

_Zephyr. His current boyfriend. Why is he calling me?_ Apollo questions to himself.

Apollo sighs, forcibly wiping away the tears from his eyes and blinking hard to focus back. Somewhat snappishly, he retorts, “What, did he get arrested? I’m busy right now, I don’t want to bai—”

 _“No,”_ Zephyr’s voice cut in. _“He’s in the ER right now. Car crash. Thought I’d tell you.”_

Immediately, Apollo feels his blood run cold. The voice that asks his question doesn’t sound like his voice, but like someone else’s coming out of another person’s mouth. “ _Car crash_? Who the fuck was driving?”

 _“It was me,”_ he admits somewhat apologetically. _“No one else was sober eno—”_

“ _That’s why you have the designated driver, dumbass!_ ” Apollo yells into the phone, bolting straight up. He hadn’t bothered to change is clothes, so despite his sunken and red eyes, he’s still in jeans and a decent t-shirt, ready to go anytime. “You said you’d take good care of Hya, and you went and fucking _crashed the car?_ Holy shit, I thought you were a nice person!”

_“It was an accid—”_

“Fuck off with your excuses,” Apollo snaps, already gathering Hyacinthus’s items, fueled by rage and none of his sadness from before. “Which hospital?”

Zephyr takes a deep breath, but he seems to realize that he deserves everything Apollo has said. _Good,_ Apollo thinks. _There’s more coming._

 _“The one near Shatter,”_ Zephyr says. _“He’s in critical condition, so please hurry—”_

“Of-fucking-course he is,” Apollo mutters darkly, then he ends the call, throws on a hoodie, and races out of the apartment as fast as he can. 

Everything else is a blur. Apollo remembers getting into his car, throwing all of Hya’s belongings on the passenger seat, smelling Hya’s scent of chamomile and ink on the hoodie, and breaking around twenty speeding laws trying to get to the hospital as fast as he can, love me back be damned.

Right now, though, Apollo is vividly aware of gripping Hyacinthus’s hand tightly, feeling the weak attempt at a squeeze, and Hya’s fluttering eyelids showing flashes of his dark irises. “Stay alive, stay alive, stay alive, please, stay alive,” Apollo chants, as if by saying that he can tether Hya to mortality for longer.

“Can’t,” Hya murmurs, just like he’d done when they were twelve, but with more blood, IV and blood transfusion pouches, and bandages on his head. “It hurts. Don’t wanna be here.”

Hyacinthus’s weak voice pulls out all of Apollo’s emotions all over again, and he can’t stop the tears that demand to be let out despite Apollo knowing damn well that Hyacinthus has gone past the point of no return.

“I’m sorry,” Apollo says, bordering on hysteria, “I’m sorry I can’t help you—stay alive, please, stay alive, for me, please—”

“Have to go,” Hya mumbles, eyelids drooping, heartbeat slowing. “Here. Closer.” The doctors and nurses are immediately up and about, preparing defilbrators, trying everything they can to keep Hyacinthus alive, but despite Apollo’s desperate pleas, he knows that Hya can’t stay.

Apollo leans forward as asked, trying to stop the tears from blurring his vision. “What’s up, Hya?” he asks as casually as possible, despite his voice cracking on the last word.

“Sorry,” is what Hyacinthus says, as well as, “ _I love you.”_

And then the heartbeat drops.

  
  


######  _v._

Apollo falls asleep next to Hyacinthus’ bed, sitting on the chair. He has no idea how the nurses and doctors allowed that, but the next day when he lifts his head, the nurses, alongside the parents, are staring at an empty socket in the wall.

 _They unplugged his life support,_ Apollo realizes, immediately bolting upright. Hya’s face is peaceful as ever, even with the metal holding his skull together, but when Apollo touches his hand, it’s cold like a corpse’s.

It’s cold because it’s a corpse’s.

“No…” Apollo mumbles, staring at his immortally sleeping friend, trying to fight against logic and three years of medical school, finding a way to _somehow,_ somehow revive Hya, even with nothing of him left in the body sleeping next to him.

But when Hya’s parents eventually steers him out of the room—they’ve always treated him like their second (only, now) child, the blur that his brain has put in place to deny what has happened is gone, and the tears are flowing down his face again, and Apollo stands there, near the receptionist, silently, quietly, unmovingly crying and yet he feels numb and devoid of all emotion.

The journey back to his dorm feels like another blur. Shock and pain from Hya’s passing—death—still numbs him, still silences him, and his hoodie, a result of Apollo grabbing the wrong clothes, is now one of the only things left in the world that used to belong to Hyacinthus.

_Sorry. I love you._

_I love you too,_ Apollo replies, far too late.

  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> hope you like it


End file.
